BOOKS
Rigour and Abundance
BY FRANK
KERM ODE
TN 1830 Joseph Severn, who had nursed Keats in his last illness, spent part of every day talking
to the dying Scott. Once he happened to mention that Keats's fame was increasing, and was sur- prised that Scott showed signs of distress at the mention of the poet's name. 'Yes, yes,' said Scott, 'the world finds out these things for itself at last.' He was thinking of his own connection with the Quarterly; only twelve years had passed since Croker's review of Endymion.
The malice of Croker and Lockhart is still remarkable, but nobody now believes that they killed Keats; the world is still finding these things out for itself, indefatigably, and the facts do not support this nineteenth-century myth. Another Victorian view that has almost been given up is that the poet unhappily succumbed to an element of mawkish sensuality in his ungentlemanly character. Monckton Milnes clearly felt he must do what he could to prove that Keats was all but a gentleman, and nearly went to Harrow; but the publication of the Fanny Brawne letters made this hard to believe. Arnold, to whom Keats was very important, struggled with his distaste at the poet's lack of moral fibre and 'confused multitudinous- ness'; even Yeats dwelt on the paradox that such 'luxuriant song' should issue from 'the coarse- bred son of a livery-stable keeper,' though he found the paradox of much significance for modern art. That our own attitude is superficially different, being compounded of the scholar's scriptural devotion to minutix, the pseudo- Shakespearian idolatries of Middleton Murry, and the scepticism of Dr. Leavis, does not in- validate the Victorian myths; they commented, with some distortion, on elements in the per- sonality of the poet which contributed to the developing notion of the poet's necessary estrange- ment from the public, and to the related one, that the nature of his difference lay in his superior sensibility, always dangerous to life, health and sanity. We still take something like that for granted though the attention we give Keats is somewhat differently focused.
Among the reasons for the change are these. Keats has got progressively easier to read : he cannot now seem prodigiously strange and original. (Byron, it seems, didn't understand what was meant by 'a beaker full Of the warm South.') W.; can take in our stride what used to seem offensive; Arnold would have shaken his head over the change from 'unclasps her bosom jewels' to 'unclasps her warmed jewels,' whereas it seems to us merely better. ('Warro' was a sex- charged word; Keats 'warmed' with the girl Mr.
Gittings identified as Isabella Jones.) We disgust less easily, and get on better with confused multitudinousness. Another reason : the assiduity of twentieth-century scholarship has given us new notions both of the extent of Keats's intellec- tual operations and of his knowledge of the world. But above all, there have been, since H. Buxton Forman's edition of 1883, constantly improving collected editions of the letters, supple- mented by minute research into Keats's circle. He is now known with remarkable intimacy. And cer- tainly his letters are the best of any English poet; only Hopkins and Lawrence can approach them. Their excellence is of a peculiar kind. ,Words- worth's letters illuminate, but only in infrequent flashes; Keats requires to be read with much the same degree of attention throughout.
This being so, scholars very properly continue to devote themselves to problems of text, canon and arrangement. The latest of them is Professor Hyder Rollins, whose edition of the letters* was published shortly after his death. This edition is certainly the best; it is rather fuller than Maurice Buxton Forman's Oxford text, mostly by reason of the inclusion of other people's letters; its text varies a little from Forman's, and the order of the letters is occasionally changed. Biographies of correspondents are fuller, and the index is better. The familiar Oxford edition remains adequate for nearly all purposes (though it may be worth men- tioning that Forman's No. 237, which credits Keats with the words 'I don't think I shall be long ill,' is now known to be a forgery). But the new edition will have to be used when fullness and exactness of information are needed.
Rereading the letters, one is more and more puzzled that anyone could have been so impercep- tive as to blanket them all in that common word 'common,' or have allowed their occasional luxuri- ance to obscure the evidence of rich and develop- ing intellect. Keats, writing in his early twenties, the years when desire and fancy most distort our minds, strove (to recall a splendid phrase of Santayana's) to honour both rigour and abund- ance, both the truth and the eagle. Leaving poetry out of the comparison, Shelley was, beside Keats, hysterical, Byron commonplace, and Wordsworth deficient in self-criticism.
, This is not to say that the letters lack evidence of what a hostile moralist might call a certain coarseness or excessive sens.Jality. Keats's doctor said : 'I fear he has long been governed by his imagination and feelings and now has little power to keep them under.' Severn saw in the dying man how high was the price of a life of sensations—'dying in horror—no kind of hope to smooth his suffering—no philosophy—no religion to support him—yet with all the most gnawing desire for it—yet without the possibility of receiv- ing it.' This was the root of the Victorian myth; and Yeats thought of it when he called Endymion the first poem of a new and tragic age for poets :
What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair?
Yet it is not the despair or the dissipation but the awakening that animates the letters. On his deathbed, fiercely alone and able to bear the 'identity' of no one but Severn, Keats achieved, ironically, the isolation he had long sought. The letters often speak of the unwelcome pressure of other 'identities' and though the jargon may have been learned from Hazlitt, the poet's desire to purge his mind of opinion, whether his own or others, was genuine, and kept him to his regime of fierce self-refinement. He saw through Hay-
* THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS, 1814-1821. Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (C.U.P., don and Hunt, and freed himself from 'that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary.' He even, with- out loss of humility, saw why Milton and Words- worth would not do. As to the public, the Endymion Preface was only one proof that he could not address it 'without feelings of hostility.' He went on maturing his verse `by sensation and watchfulness'; if he published, it was to benefit himself only. He knew how far there was to go. At twenty-three, 'with little knowledge and middling intellect,' he had 'been cheated into some fine passages; but that is nothing.' He determined to undergo 'the sacrifice of all that is called com- fort' to buy maturity; he chose energy when he could have chosen despair, becoming 'a little more of a Philosopher than I was,' moving farther and farther from 'the set of little people we live amongst'; moving, too, from abundance to rigour. He called the process 'soul-making,' and that is not too grand a way to speak of his emergence from pet-lamb versifying into the darkness where 'life must be undergone.' The second Hyperion is the great allegory of this transition.
Not so long afterwards, tormented by disease and jealousy, Keats said, 'we cannot be created for this kind of suffering.' The tempering of the poetical character as Keats—and Yeats—under- stood it, is not the same art as the art of holy dying. They would have agreed that the cultit ation of 'organic sensibility,'- which makes possible the full activity of the truth-bearing imagination, Is dangerous 4o virtue and to life itself. It is one thing to see the face of Moneta, another to live on. There is just so much truth in the Victorian myth. An agnostic in matters of literary myth might find it reasonable to believe that Keats could have got through the crisis; that he was simply very unlucky. He would have seen through the love affair he would have preferred not to have; his sexuality seems to have been normal enough, with the usual blend of frivolity and obscenity, but he was possessed by Fanny Brawne and grew too weak to fight her off. His illness alone made hint the prototype of Yeats's tragic generation, falsely emphasising his estrangement and his creative agony. It Made it possible to represent him aS entirely the instrument of the specialised imagina- tion, which brings truth but solves no problems in the world of action—marriage, recovery. But the myth denies the fortuitousness of disease, and even, in some versions, such as Thomas Mann's, makes it both essential and matter of choice. The supremacy among Keats's poems of the 'Ode to Autumn' confirms the myth; it is without action, without syntax, an emblem of future art; and a whole century of poetry moved only from Keats's nightingale to Yeats's golden bird. Keats himself referred to this special impotence in an astonishing sentence of his last letter. 'There is one thought enough to kill me—I have been well, healthy, alert, &e. walking with her—and now—the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that infor- mation (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are. great enemies to the recovery of the stomach., How vividly that etymological use of 'information conveys the sense of the poet possessed by the poem to be written! It is the form that gives mean- ing to his matter, cruelly indifferent to all his other functions, such as life. His misery and the memorY of happiness possessed him like a poem. With inore philosophy and less imagination, by a sacrifice of abundance to rigour, he might, thought the doctor, have survived. But it was too late to stop being a poet, and the myths began; he was snuffed out bY an article, or he was the victim of his own enor- mous sensations;. and the reminiscences and letter- collecting began, for of the poetical character. We cannot know too much. And now we have a little more to learn from Professor Rollins.
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